Guillermo Powell heads up the Spanish department at Logos, which is responsible for creating and promoting our Spanish language products to North America and the world. Guillermo was also the subject of a recent post about his trip to Perú.

If you’ve read the Logos Bible Software Blog for awhile, you have probably heard us refer to the oh-so-cool automated espresso machine that does its part to keep Logos running smoothly.

And you’ve probably seen us refer to the Logos Clear Glass Mug. I use mine every day; it does the trick and does it well.

(pauses to sip from his double americano, no milk, no sugar)

But I don’t know that you’ve seen us extol the virtues of the Logos Insulated Travel Mug. This is a beautiful thing, it allows us to take 16 ounces of sweet java elixir from the machine out the door and on the road.

And it is the perfect conversation starter to tell your friends, neighbors, or even the person sitting next to you on the bus or train about your Bible software!

But if you are a newer Logos Bible Software user, or a new reader of this blog, you might not have found them yet. So check out this page that has all sorts of different resolutions of the two backgrounds we currently offer:

If you’re unfamiliar with our Community Pricing projects, you should acquaint yourself with them. In Deissmann we have a tangible example of how beneficial it can be to subscribe to projects in their early (and somewhat uncertain) stages.

Here’s how the pricing progressed during the early stages of this product’s lifetime:

Thanks and congratulations to those who subscribed early (and, some of you, often!). You got a great resource at a fantastic price. I trust you’ll find Deissmann’s LAE to be a beneficial secondary source to consult for more information when working with New Testament (Hellenistic) Greek.
If you are not a regular pre-pub or community pricing bidder, jump in now. There are still plenty of deals to be had!

Thoroughness is one of the hallmarks of electronic books produced for Logos Bible Software. When we produce an electronic edition of a printed book we try to include all of the content and every bit of relevant formatting. We also include detailed bibliographic information so that users can cite our electronic editions with confidence.

For this reason it always bothered me that our King James Version of the Bible – the textual patriarch of English-language Bible study – offered so little in the way of formatting, notes, and bibliographic detail. The KJV was our first electronic text, and while we have dozens of print copies, we produced our KJV from electronic sources.

In 1991, when we started working on Logos Bible Software, we purchased a disk set with the KJV text from Public Brand Software. It consisted of the text of the verses and nothing else, but it was adequate for our initial development and testing. Larry Pierce, who wrote The Online Bible, used this same text as the basis for his electronic KJV, but he hand corrected the files to match the 1769 Blayney Edition, published by Cambridge University Press, and added Strong’s numbers.

Larry’s text of the KJV was clearly the best available. Subsequent analysis has shown it to be error-free in its transcription of the Blayney Edition, and the addition of Strong’s numbers made it even more useful. With permission, we used it as the first electronic book released for Logos Bible Software.

Still, we got calls, letters, and emails from users who claimed it did not match their printed KJV. We discovered that, contrary to widely-held views, there is not one single text of the KJV. Almost no one is using (or even could use) the original 1611 text, and in the years since then there have been many intentional and unintentional typographic, editorial, and spelling changes propagated in hundreds of different editions.

Moreover, we did not even have a paper copy of the Blayney Edition we were distributing. Our electronic text was simply the Bible text, and we were missing front matter, notes, bibliographic information and more. While this isn’t a problem for Bible study, it is a problem for people comparing editions and preparing academic papers.

We went on a hunt for a definitive King James Version in print that we could reproduce completely, with all the bibliographic and supplementary material. We wanted a text with a clear pedigree and the smallest chance of errors introduced in multiple settings and printings.

After talking with publishers, Bible societies, and scholars, we concluded that the 1873 Cambridge Paragraph Bible, edited by F. H. A. Scrivener, was the best edition to use. More than a century after the Blayney Edition, Scrivener had done an incredibly comprehensive and careful revision of the KJV text. The text was paragraphed. Poetry was formatted in poetic form. Italics and cross references were thoroughly checked. Most importantly, Scrivener thoroughly documented his work. He noted errors in earlier editions and provided a “List of Passages in which this Edition follows others in departing from the Text of 1611.”

Scrivener’s edition of the text has been reprinted in later editions, but we wanted the whole thing, with all of the appendices and notes, straight from the original. So we began a year-long search for a printed copy that we could borrow long enough to photograph at high resolution using our robotic book scanner.

Norton’s book is an awe-inspiringly detailed look at the history of the text itself, and its preservation and corruption over the years. (I use the word corruption as a technical, not theological, term.) It reinforced for us the conclusion that identifying a definitive “real KJV” is nearly impossible. It also made it clear that nobody spent more time on the problem than Scrivener. (In explaining why no work was done on the cross references in his New Cambridge Paragraph Bible, Norton confesses to lacking Scrivener’s energy. If you read this book, you will confess to lacking the energy of either of them.)

We are trying to get permission to produce an electronic edition of the New Cambridge Paragraph Bible, but we believe that there is still value in having access to Scrivener’s monumental edition, complete with formatting, italics, cross references, introductions, apocrypha, and incredibly detailed appendices. So, when we finally found an 1873 original that we could borrow, we photographed it at high resolution and had it typed at 99.995% accuracy.

(We normally have books typed at 99.95% accuracy, which requires double-keying and comparing the files. We had the Cambridge Paragraph Bible checked to 99.995% accuracy, the highest level our vendor would guarantee.)

Our edition for the Libronix DLS is the most comprehensive and best documented KJV available electronically. The integration of the marginal notes and cross references into popup footnotes makes it easy to read. The Compare Parallel Bible Versions tool lets you compare the two KJV editions, and the ability to search appendices by Bible reference makes it easy to find Scrivener’s explanations for the different readings or spellings.

The 1769 Blayney and 1873 Cambridge editions side by side. The Cambridge features poetry formatting and notes. The comparison report below shows the single word difference in Proverbs 4.

The Libronix DLS-compatible Cambridge Paragraph Bible will be available with the release of Logos Bible Software 3. We will even have the page photographs available in the future.

Yesterday on Blogos, Sean Boisen wrote about the difficulty he had finding the verse containing the phrase “you will know them by their words”. He was looking for Matthew 7:16 and 20, and tried using “know” and “words” as search terms in Bible software.

Of course the verse says fruits, not words, and in some versions it says recognize, not know.
This is exactly what we created the Fuzzy Search for: finding things that you don’t remember exactly, or remember from a different translation.

Fuzzy Search was a feature in Logos Bible Software v1.0, back in December, 1991. It got lost along the way, disappearing from updates to the LLS and Libronix DLS, but was restored as part of the Power Tools Addin a few years ago. It lives on the Tools > Power Tools menu, but moves to the Search menu in the upcoming v3.0.

I wanted to see if Fuzzy Search could meet this real world test case. In Logos Bible Software I opened a few Bibles and chose Fuzzy Search from the Search menu. I copied the phrase “you will know them by their words” into the Search box and chose “All Open Resources” from the search target dropdown. A click on the green Go button brought back Matthew 7:20 in the NRSV as a 90% confidence hit, followed by Matthew 7:16, with 87% confidence.

Pretty cool!

(I should also point out that it found “Ye shall know them by their fruits” in the KJV, 74%, and “you will recognize them by their fruits” in the ESV, 72%.)

That space—which has a very cool loft-like vibe with beautiful hardwood floors and exposed brick walls—has now been converted into a comfortable, fully-furnished, brightly decorated, creative meeting space.

The name ‘Room2Think,’ inspired by the high ceilings and airy feel of the space, suggests its intended purpose: provide groups with a place to get away from the daily grind and drab office, open up to new ideas, build teamwork, get creative, and dream for the future.

We thought it was such a great idea (and a step up from the usual, boring, hotel conference room) that we went ahead and created a space like this for Bellingham!

We didn’t take the “kindergarten classroom” motif quite as far as the places described in the Inc. article, but Room2Think is definitely a hipper and more fun place than my house.

Here’s why: wall-sized projection screen, Dolby 5.1 surround sound system, automated espresso maker (not quite as cool as our famous machine but it makes a good cup), wall-sized whiteboard, comfortable seating for up to 20 people, ping pong, air hockey, and all the office supplies needed to dream and plan.

We’re excited to play a role in promoting creative thinking and planning among local businesses. And Logos will be using the space now and again, too…so I guess it’s fair to expect even more new and creative features from your Bible software.

One of the new features that is implemented in the now-release-candidate Logos Bible Software 3.0 involves a significant enhancement to our sentence diagrammer.

I discussed this back in December 2005 and illustrated the new functionality with a short video. Check it out.

I bring it up again because first of all, blocking is cool. Secondly because I used the feature in preparation for the Sunday sermon and thought I’d share it. The pastor at the church I attend has been working through Mark’s Gospel. I like to work ahead so I’m prepared for what he might say. This weekend, before the service, I did a quick block of Mark 4.1-9 so I had a decent grasp of the text before the sermon.

Now, a few disclaimers: I have no formal training in blocking, just my own reading, thinking and practice. My blocking style (as with most folks) is a bit haphazard. I don’t have a systematic method for representing things. Indentions may be for grammatical/syntactic reasons (subordinate clauses, prepositional phrases, etc.) or because I think content is logically dependent on what precedes it. Or because I think I need to but am not quite sure why. It’s just me thinking through the text; the process is more valuable than the output. When you block Mark 4.1-9 (go ahead, try it!) you will likely come out with something completely different. My point is that thinking through the passage at this level is the important part; the output only serves to remind you of your thoughts.

Also, I used the new Logos Bible Software 3.0 Highlighting features to highlight repeated words and phrases that I noticed. So when you see the highlights, that’s where they came from. Yep, you can highlight more than books & Bibles! And I saved a PDF version of the diagram using the new PDF button on the diagrammer toolbar.

Interesting idea. Now, apply it to citations of the Old Testament found in a book of the New Testament. This would allow someone to judge the density of quotes from a particular part of the Old Testament. This could be helpful for judging where allusions or even echoes may be found in the New Testament text.

Jim is suggesting that the same Power Law relationship that exists between a corpus of “biblical studies literature” and Bible passages could also be observed between the New Testament and the Old Testament.

They found that, “in absolute terms, the New Testament writers cited Psalms and Isaiah most often.” When controlling for book length (since longer books tend to get cited more often than short books), Malachi and Habakkuk get the prize for being most often cited by NT writers.

Head over to the ESV Bible Blog and check out their charts showing citation density and a table showing how many times each NT book cites each OT book.

Two quick thoughts…

First, the next step might be to plot density in a more granular fashion. Which chapters or pericopes in the OT are most often cited? And which chapters or pericopes in the NT do the most citing?
This could make for a cool report in Logos Bible Software, plotting parallel passages data (OT quotes in the NT) against chapter or pericope data from a version of choice.

Second, I don’t know what data the ESV team is using to generate their chart, but I would guess data produced by an editor. In other words, a really smart person (or team of smart people) analyzed the New Testament and figured out all the places the NT author was quoting the OT.

Another way to get at that information—a way that is better for some purposes, less suited for others—would be for the software to analyze and plot out similarities between the OT and NT, based on vocabulary plus syntax. This would put the Bible software user in the editor’s seat, or at least provide a way to view the data and perhaps discover additional textual similarities (in this case, between the Septuagint and Greek NT). We’re not there yet in terms of the data, but it never hurts to dream!

All this talk makes me eager to tell the world about all the new, useful ways we’re already combining and displaying data in Logos Bible Software 3 (now in Release Candidate 1). We’ve been spilling the beans about Logos 3 here on the blog; if you’re a new reader, here’s a place to start.

It’s also exciting to realize that the new reports and tools in Logos 3 are just the tip of the iceberg. With all the new data we now have, and are still producing, there’s plenty more to dream and plenty more to realize.

Update: 3/20/2006 – 3:00pm PST

Today’s post on the ESV Bible Blog provides additional charts that go beyond OT-in-NT quotations to show Power Law patterns based on some 80,000 cross references spread across the Bible. One chart plots cross references between books; another plots them between chapters. The raw data is also provided in an Excel spreadsheet so you can produce your own charts. Cool!